Is no one talking about the gigantic STRAPONS these [abuse removed. Don't do it again - Admin] are wearing PRETENDING they are just simply stunningly innovative? This trailer is really shocking, not even the way it’s completely super PR representationally ironed into almost being an over-oiled hypemotor, but simply the statements in themselves. Talking about extreme representation.

We really thought about these blackguards… they have to look scary.. I have never been more goddamn annoyed by a concept artist pretending ’so to make them less human I did not give them a face’ is a conscious decision. I have never heard bullshit like ‘we are not going to let any creativity be hindered by the limitations of 3D technology’. I really don’t understand what is new about a ‘biological outbreak’ that turns everyone into super-ultra-mega-zombies. Oh gosh, morale! Do I shoot the innocents, or is the virus worse. So we start with the ‘mindset’. Germany in 1932, none of it was an accident, they intend to look intimidating. Gosh innovation!

I am whimpering.

If a game would incorporate Ass Creed’s seamless (i thought) Parkour-movement with the insane jumping, running gameplay of Crackdown, I’d be in heaven. Hopefully Prototype will do this. I don’t want to have to jump at a building 3 or 4 times before I finally manage to latch onto a ledge or something silly. What I WANT is to jump at a building–and if I miss, or haven’t jumped quite high enough–have the character grab a small crack or something and then allow me to jump again from there, or scramble around until I find another suitable place to jump from.

Crackdown was almost there, but with the free-moving style of Ass Creed it would have been amazing.

KG

@ɹǝʌo llǝɟ ı poƃ ʎɯ ɥo: Personally I found the core mechanics of movement in Assassin’s Creed on a par with Crackdown in terms of how satisfying it is to move about, but this is always going to be a matter of personal opinion. I’d also agree with Kieron that grafting traditional platforming mechanics directly into Assassin’s Creed would make the game much more frustrating, particularly as you don’t have the superhuman damage resistance or the ability to rewind time to fall back on if you miss a jump.

I could be barking up the wrong tree here (and showing some shameful ignorance) but isn’t the Thief series kind of a little like the “GTA in Ye Olde Times”?

Erm, no, it’s not. The first two Thief games were a series of independent missions tied together by a storyline–like nearly every FPS ever made (though this was sneaking, not shooting).

The third Thief game incorporated a “City hub” between missions, which was decent but the incredibly small size of the areas lessened the impact. Still, you’d never mistake it for a go-anywhere, do-anything world like GTA or its clones.

But, as it always seems to, we come back to Crackdown. It had rather more traditional platforming mechanics, including giving me the ability to jump and shuffle and grab and drop, and was the better game for it.

The argument that “it’s not fun to do free-roaming in The Olden Days because we don’t have cars” is silly when you notice that the cars are almost completely superfluous in crackdown, unless you’re doing the completely optional street races.

(There’s a debate I was following, where a dev was saying that they’ll never see a GTA in a old-world-thing, because walking and horsing around just isn’t very interesting. The Parkour-movement was AC’s attempt to deal with that particular problem – so if it was as tricky to pull off as PoP could be – i.e. you had to think about it a lot more – it’ll lose its utility as a transport device. If it’s going to be routine to fail, you’re just going to walk…)

Not that I think AssCreed is entirely successful, but I can see why they did it.

KG

Not necessarily. Look at STALKER. It definitely “presents the player with a free roaming world, dotted with strings of more intense content, tied together to produce an overarching plot line”, and at the same time is firmly within the FPS genre.